Genres
HEA / HFN
Happily Ever After and Happy For Now: the romance genre's baseline ending expectation, treated as near-inviolable.
HEA (Happily Ever After) and HFN (Happy For Now) are the romance genre's baseline requirement: a central love story plus an emotionally satisfying, optimistic ending. The romance-reading community treats this as a hard rule rather than a loose convention; it is the single most-enforced genre expectation in fiction publishing.
The distinction: an HEA resolves the relationship permanently; an HFN resolves it for now, honestly. Writers crossing romance with other genres (romantasy) inherit the requirement with it.